All She Wrote

I'd be interested to find out what my carbon footprint is having spent around 1,000 hours in the air in the last 12 months

Cheapskate22

florens

LCY8737

LTN Phobia

This topic was originally posted in BA forum, however it has no BA-specific content so it has been moved here.

LTN Phobia
Moderator: BA forum

TWCLAM

Medically barred from driving so at home I take public transport or walk and the same when i am away including taking long distance & overnight trains inside central & eastern european countries which is an experience in itself at times. My footprint compared to most is tiny so I care little about putting money into some big central pot where I have no knowledge where it actually goes and what it's actually used for.

If I visit somewhere whilst away and they have some form of green scheme or eco drive and I have faith in it then i'll generally pop a fairly big note in the pot for that otherwise I give little interest to being lectured by those who probably cause more of the problem than I do ( generally speaking not directed at anyone here).

I get taxed in new and imaginative ways for anything HM Gvmnt & others around the world thinks it can get away with ( travel, energy, green city taxes, blah blah blah) so the desire to self tax myself a second time coz some star/ starlet/ politician/ media entity has gotten excited about something that week doesn't appeal to me in the slightest. Tbh I roll my eyes when I see headlines like "world set to reach tipping point by 2050" when I read the identical headline and story but with the year 2020 in it 15 years ago. I do my bit when & where I want to otherwise i'm fine with my already low footprint.

You dont need to throw money at something to be a responsible traveller. Don't have all your towels changed everyday, be fine with bed linen being changed every few days( save if they get messy or you've sweated like a hippo the night before) dont ask for a straw in your drink or better still say you dont want one, if a city has a good public transport network then use it instead of getting cabs everywhere. The day an airline lets me know that it's going to round up a fare to help me be a better person( ie stops giving me the option & just does it) is the day I tell them to XXXXXXX

fassy

All She Wrote

I average around 15-17 a week for work, the rest is leisure.

fotographer

Paying money to some group to off set your carbon footprint, does nothing but make that group rich

Lizie

+1 fotographer.

Companies have an allocation how much carbon they can release for free. Go over it they pay more, go under it they sell it on the carbon trading floor.

BearX220

I am super cynical about carbon offset schemes that prey on travelers' sense of fashionable guilt. The providers are generally for-profit companies with rent to pay, executives to compensate, and investors to satisfy.

And beyond that: almost everything you do / buy / etc. comes with a carbon footprint. That bowl of avocados on your kitchen counter was trucked in from somewhere; to whom are you writing that offset check? What about those shirts you just ordered from another continent, or that stream of Amazon boxes? How are you offsetting their carbon expenditures?

Of the whole giant realm of regular human activity, only air travel excites this particular guilt trip and invites a cash-based absolution solution, like when the Church collected payment for indulgences to clean up your record with higher powers.

If we want to finance a feasible transition to a post-carbon world, we should trade with forward-looking companies doing research and development in support thereof, not send silly fees to third parties who will spend a lot of said fee on their own workers and profits.

Badenoch

I'm not limiting or changing anything nor am I going to pay the modern equivalent of papal indulgences to satisfy judgmental prigs making apocalyptic predictions based on arguable science. My carbon footprint is just fine as it is.

TWCLAM

Yup and we all remember that time when we paid additional money to XXXX company to help us sleep better at night & when they found out they had spare credits they could sell for a profit how that company then contacted us to say how great they'd been and here was our share of that money back

It's nothing but a tax on the gullible to further aid shareholders profits. When the biggest producers worldwide get an exemption on a country wide basis as they're an emerging economy it shows the whole thing to be rotten to the core and nothing more than a cash cow lining pockets of those whose pockets are, generally, in no need of padding anymore.

OccasionalFlyerPerson

I don't fly excessively, but it simply isn't possible to get around the world in any other way. I'm going to be going to Asia in September, Africa in March, and possibly the Middle East later this year. The first two are for work.

In my daily life, I'm vegan, and don't own any motorised transport as well. I cycle everywhere, recycle as much as I can, try to avoid food waste (though this is definitely an area for improvement), try to use second hand goods, try to use goods as long as I can, etc. I feel that overall my carbon footprint is smaller than others in my country, even with occasional flying.

In writing this answer, I found this website:https://co2.myclimate.org/en/offset_further_emissions It does list a number of charity projects I could support that would compensate for the CO2 produced with my flight which will also benefit people elsewhere in the world. I'm now very seriously considering supporting one of these projects.

PaxxMantid

A friend of mine is an environmental engineer and he claims that the carbon offset thing is not very meaningful. Does anyone know exactly what happens when you purchase the carbon offset?